KIYOSHI KUROSAWA: CLOUD (2024)

Exposé of crooked online sales degenerates into a shootout

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cloud begins as a techno-thriller exploring the reprehensible side of online product reselling and its moral and physical consequences. The film follows Ryosuke Yoshii, a seemingly innocent young man who energetically and adeptly makes money by buying products wholesale and reselling them individually online. He finds that he can sell products rapidly this way even when sometimes his markup is outrageous - say, from 10,000¥ up to 100,000¥ ($67 to $675).

As we watch dozens of images of the same product with its price on an internet screen quickly switching to "SOLD", with Yoshii glancing sideways at the event as if he well knows he's getting away with something, it may not be too much to say there is a creeping feeling of an invasion of something vaguely improper and dangerous going on, a kind of thrill of the grifter successfully at work. This is when the film is at its strongest and the viewer is fullest of attention and expectationl. There are only hints of the resentment this methodology may be engendering in the public, but they are enough to , and will silently and invisibly bloom.

Things go south when Cloudshifts from soft crime film to revenge action and then to Western style shootout in its latter half. Kurosawa never stops producing a smooth, effective entertainment, but the specificity, topicality, and good sense of this film have slipped away.

It's understood that as Yoshii's practices increasingly attract customer resentment and a desire to uncover his identity and seek revenge. See David Hudson's essay for Criterion on Kiyoshi Kurosawi's "biggest year" and Cloud..

But also see Peter Bradshaw's review in the Guardian for April 21, 2025.Awarding the film only a miserable two our of five stars,Bradshaw says it's another illustrationg o f the fact that "movies about internet crime can so easily unravel into implausible silliness." Some of Kurosawa's details are questionable, says Bradshaw, such as Yoshii'sselling a brnkrupted company's therapy devices: why wouldn't the company itself sell them? Some items are legitimate. However some are not, notably fake designer bags sold at a whopping price as genuine. (Again, Yoshii seems to find you can sell anything online for a good price, whether authentic or fake.)

Bradshaw complains that "all the hi-tech detail and low-key everyday believability of the story" are eventually "jettisoned" in favor of the final "entirely ridiculous shootout in a deserted factory" (a very standard trope, by the way), accompanied by "many deafening bullet ricochets off metal fittings." Bradshaw with justification describes the concluding half hour as a "neo-western style melee which seems to go on forever." It does go on interestingly sometimes - I liked the confusing way Yoshii's assistant Sano (Daiken Okudaira) comes and goes, for instance; but the fact remains that the focus on online crime in reselling goods gets very largely lost in the action, and certainly the details of Yoshii's malfeisances do.


Ghost, 124 mins., premiered at Venice Aug. 30, 2024, showing also at Toronto Sept. 5. 2024, Busan Oct. 3, 2024, Los Angeles (Beyond Fest) Oct. 9, 2024; several dozen other internatonal festivals. Limited US theatrical release July 18, 2025. Screened for this review as part of Jul. 10-20, 2025 Japan Cuts, whose showtime was July 16. Metacritic rating: 75%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.